We were chatting with a firefighter last weekend and realized he'd been on the crew that put out a fire near our old house in San Rafael. That was the day we started taking emergency preparedness seriously. I was working from home when a helicopter flew in low over the backyard and dropped its bucket into the lagoon behind us. Then I saw the smoke. From our upstairs window, we could see flames on the hill, about 700 feet away. We grabbed what mattered most: our cat, our finan